Patterico's Pontifications

3/7/2006

Does That Mean the Argument is 1000 Times Less Convincing Than You Thought?

Filed under: Dog Trainer — Patterico @ 10:12 pm



Kevin Roderick has a fun L.A. Times correction from today:

Abortion: A March 4 column about abortion and overpopulation said that “roughly 10 billion people” die of hunger annually. The correct figure is 10 million.

This is, of course, almost certainly an innocent error. The column in question noted that the world population had hit 6.5 billion recently; it’s a safe bet that the columnist didn’t believe that almost twice that number dies every year. Still, worth a chuckle.

9 Responses to “Does That Mean the Argument is 1000 Times Less Convincing Than You Thought?”

  1. Recently on Fox News Martha McCallum reported while narrating a video of a car chase in LA something about the “large SUV weighing five hundred thousand pounds” made a quick turn or something. After the outrageous weight statement I lost the rest of the narrative. Too busy laughing.

    Jim (8445eb)

  2. Here’s what’s going on. People from other realities are coming to ours to die because we have better death benefits. Thus the vastly inflated annual mortality. I mean, even an American Congressbeastie can’t spend money as fast as the deficit indicates. There’s something else draining our coffers.

    Alan Kellogg (250df8)

  3. Five hundred thousand pounds? Do you have any idea what the overweight fine on that would be? 🙂

    In my industry, I have to know the weight laws; in Pennsylvania (and most places) a tractor-trailer cannot gross over 80,000 lb.

    Dana (3e4784)

  4. More of that 4 levels of fact checking the MSM is famous for.

    Bill (02ae5f)

  5. Boy I can see why P has this thing with LAT. Wow.

    paul (464e99)

  6. Even reduced, that 10 million number is suspect. First, it’s a nice round number and people rarely die in nice round numbers. Second, the annual world death rate is around 8.78 per thousand (or 0.878%). For 10 million to die of starvation means that nearly 18% of all deaths are by starvation. In the absence of additional proof, this statistic – like the numbers of “homeless” – does not pass the smell test.

    moneyrunner (64ee6a)

  7. money, great analysis. 10 million people died due to starvation? Agree with you on the smell test and your comparison with the “numbers of ‘homeless'” figure.

    Actually, though, determining the number of homeless is easy. Just count the number of homeless in a city block, multiply that by the number of city blocks in that particular city, then multiply that by the total number of cities in the country … The result is the number of homeless in the country.

    Don’t forget to norm for the political party of the occupant of the WH. If it’s a democrat the number must be reduced to zero. If a republican multiply by pi. It’s sort of a law of nature thing.

    Harry Arthur (40c0a6)

  8. I am not convinced that starvation is caused by an insufficient world food supply. But even so the logic fails the longevity test. That 10 million figure may seem small if live births continue declining. There would be a lot of hungry seniors.

    Amphipolis (fdbc48)

  9. FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK PEOPLE UP I HAD SEX IT WAS IT WAS RELLY GOOD AND I FUCKED U UP LAST NIGHT T WAS FUCKING GOOD AND U ARE ALL BICHES AND VIGIANAS AND DICKS SUCK MY BALLLS BICHES

    max (699400)


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